Obama the Neo-conservative

In January of 2009 the far left considered Obama a living, breathing, liberal dream that would dominate Washington by changing every single Bush policy ever made. Many conservatives thought it was a nightmare because their analysis of Obama was exactly the same as the far left.

Contrary to that belief Obama has made the most controversial polices of Bush even stronger.

Obama announces that all interrogations must comply with the Army Field Manual but then has his CIA Director announce that he will seek greater interrogation authority whenever it is needed and convenes a task force to determine which enhanced interrogation methods beyond the Field Manual should be authorized.

Obama makes a melodramatic showing of ordering Guantanamo closed but then re-creates its systematic denial of detainee rights in Bagram, and last month Secretary of Defense Gates hinted that up to 100 suspected terrorists would be detained without trial.

He railed against Bush's Guantanamo military commissions but then preserved them with changes that are plainly cosmetic.

Obama has been at least as aggressive as Bush was in asserting radical secrecy doctrines in order to prevent courts from ruling on illegal torture and spying programs and to block victims from having a day in court.

He has continued and even "ramped up" so-called "targeted killings" in Pakistan and Afghanistan which have predictably caused more collateral damage to innocent civilians.

He has maintained not only Bush's rendition policy but also the standard used to determine to which countries a suspect can be rendered, and has kept Bush's domestic surveillance policies in place and unchanged.

Most of all, he has emphatically endorsed the Bush/Cheney paradigm that we are engaged in a "war" against Terrorists -- with all of the accompanying presidential "war powers" -- rather than the law enforcement challenge that John Kerry, among others, advocated.